


Bless This Good And Solid Ground

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Take Me To The Stars [42]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Injury, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26445262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: The universe is not the only dangerous place for a Time Lord and an undead, immortal human. Sometimes, there are threats much closer to home... or even inside it. A morning on the TARDIS reminds Clara of that fact.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald
Series: Take Me To The Stars [42]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1139201
Comments: 12
Kudos: 42





	Bless This Good And Solid Ground

**Author's Note:**

> A combination of [these](https://universe-on-her-shoulders.tumblr.com/post/616759199744032768/39-with-ryan-and-clara-please-thank-you) [two](https://universe-on-her-shoulders.tumblr.com/post/615824862509924352/11-49-13xclara) drabbles.

“You know…” the Doctor muses, looking at Clara over the top of her mug of tea. They’re sat on opposite sides of the island in the kitchen as they eat breakfast, the Doctor playing with her Nutella-topped toast while Clara eats a croissant as delicately as one is able to eat a croissant – which is not very. As Clara looks over at her, her attention momentarily diverted from the breakfast item, the Doctor’s face breaks into a wide, mischievous grin. “I think Ryan’s got a bit of a crush on you.”

“He has not!” Clara says at once, freezing with a piece of croissant halfway to her mouth and shaking her head hard in disbelief. A drip of jam escapes from the pastry and onto her thumb, and she licks at it absent-mindedly as she continues to shake her head and expands: “Yaz, yes. Ryan, no.”

“I think you’ve enamoured all of my team,” the Doctor teases, and Clara smiles shyly at the semi-compliment, reaching for her mug of tea with her free hand and taking a sip. “Even Graham loves you. He thinks you’re the granddaughter he never had.”

“Can I help being inherently lovable, and-stroke-or very good-looking?” Clara deadpans, adopting a martyr-like expression and the Doctor rolls her eyes fondly as Clara sets her mug back down and sticks her tongue out at the Doctor. “No, I cannot. Ryan doesn’t fancy me though.”

“He _does_.”

“He likes the fact that I own a flying diner and give him free meals,” Clara corrects, grinning at the Doctor, shoving her croissant into her mouth and chewing before continuing: “He _doesn’t_ fancy me.”

“Both,” the Doctor counters, nibbling at the edges of her toast. Nutella stains her top lip, and she licks at it thoughtfully before continuing: “I think it’s both.”

“You’re…” Clara scoffs with fond exasperation, unsure whether to be pleased or embarrassed, and settling on a combination of both. Ryan and Yaz are both barely older than she students she’d once taught, and while their admiration of her is flattering, she still feels rather odd when teased about them perhaps having romantic intentions on her… and all the more so when her partner is the one teasing her about them. “You’re incorrigible, you are.”

“No, I’m just very observant when it comes to these things. And from being very observant of these things, I have noticed that my team love you. A lot.”

“Like I said, I’m a very lovable person.”

“You are,” the Doctor says, with the sudden, surprising sincerity she employs every so often, and Clara, as she always does, turns pink by way of response. “That’s why I fell in love with you, remember?”

“Well, they can’t all fall in love with me as well,” Clara notes with pragmatism, looking down at her plate and letting her hair fall over her face while she prays for the flush in her cheeks to abate. “Or we’ll be in trouble. You’ll have competition, for a start; you’ll have to battle it out for my hand in marriage or something. And frankly, I really don’t fancy your odds with a sword. Or Ryan’s. I’m not doing first aid on you both to counter your own stupidity or clumsiness.”

“I’m well good with a sword,” the Doctor says with enthusiasm, and Clara looks up as she picks up the butter knife and makes a few sweeping, slicing gestures with it in a manner that’s wholly alarming. “I’d definitely win.”

“You sound worryingly cheerful about chopping up your friends to win my hand in marriage.”

“I wouldn’t chop them up,” the Doctor rolls her eyes, as though this is the stupidest suggestion she’s ever heard. “I’d just… I don’t know. Poke them with the point of my sword. _Tap,_ you’re out. I win.”

“Your understanding of how fights to the death work is severely compromised.”

“Can’t I be a romantic and a pacifist all at once?” the Doctor scrunches her nose up, setting the knife down and shoving the last of her toast in her mouth, saying through a mouthful of bread and Nutella: “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

“No, you’re a lover and a criminal,” Clara teases, and the Doctor looks affronted. “You break into places, nick things, mess with wiring, and then run like hell. You also eat with your mouth full.”

“I do not _break_ ,” the Doctor adopts a magnanimous tone, and swallows the last of her breakfast. “I sonic.”

“Tomato, tomayto,” Clara sticks her tongue out at her, using her last piece of croissant to mop up the remains of the jam and butter on her plate and then popping it in her mouth, chewing and swallowing before continuing: “You’re a lover, that’s good enough for me.”

“Good, because today I’m not up to doing much fighting. Or loving, actually. My plans mainly involve fixing that fluid link leak over in Sector 7G.”

“Which is Sector 7G?” Clara asks, mentally wandering around the TARDIS and trying to recall which specific stretch of corridor the Doctor means. The Doctor’s method of dividing the ship into sectors is entirely illogical and seems to follow no coherent pattern, although the Time Lady manages to keep track of them all with relative ease. Clara reckons the ship keeps moving them just to keep her on her toes, but the thought seems churlish, and so she hasn’t bothered voicing it aloud. “Is that the corridor next to the garage or the bit next to the karaoke buses?”

“It’s the stretch of corridor next to my workshop,” the Doctor runs her clean hand through her hair as she eyes up the jar of Nutella, and Clara moves it out of reach before she can get ideas. She stares at with a touch of longing, and Clara resists the urge to admonish her; she’s not one of her pupils or the Maitlands, but it _is_ still necessary to occasionally remind her that it’s impolite to use your fingers to scoop Nutella out of the jar. She’d caught her doing it the previous week; there had been a long, impassioned discussion about basic manners, which had ended with a relative impasse. “There’s a panel that keeps leaking this weird stuff every time I go past. Some kind of red fluid.”

“Oh good,” Clara says brightly, eyes wide with faux-horror. “Your ship is bleeding.”

“It’s not _bleeding_ ,” the Doctor scoffs, but she looks concerned about her ship, nonetheless. “It’s just… leaking. In a weird colour.”

“Right. And you can fix it?”

“Your lack of faith in me is _crushing_.”

“Excuse me,” Clara folds her arms and surveys the Doctor with a withering look. “Remember that time your ship filled up with zombies?”

“That wasn’t my fault,” the Doctor looks wounded by the barb. “That was entirely the fault of that magno-grab we flew into.”

“Zom. Bies,” Clara punctuates each syllable clearly and crisply, shuddering at the recollection of the hideous creatures that had pursued her around the ship. She’d lost these memories once, but they’d come back to her in a slow trickle when she’d started living in the TARDIS again, and she wonders sometimes whether it’s the ship’s way of warning her off… something. She’s not sure what, and she tries not to think about it. “Actual zombies. No thank you.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“It vanished when a zombie version of my future self tried to throw me into the Eye of Harmony.”

“Well, it didn’t manage it,” the Doctor raises her eyebrows, as though that settles everything. “So, please rediscover your sense of adventure.”

“Do you promise no zombies?”

“Yes, I promise no zombies. Absolutely none, in fact.”

“I’m holding you to that.”

“Please do,” the Doctor rolls her eyes, setting her dirty plate in the sink and earning a grateful smile from Clara in return. “I’m fixing the TARDIS to avoid any more incidents like that, you know?”

“I know,” Clara gets to her feet, circling the island and wrapping her arms around the Doctor’s shoulders. “I just like winding you up.”

“I know,” the Doctor hums, leaning back into the embrace. “Come and sit with me while I work?”

“Why?”

“You brighten the room considerably.”

“You’re working in a cor-”

“Don’t be such a pedant. Come and sit with me,” the Doctor’s hand settles over hers, and she asks with surprising vulnerability: “Please.”

“Alright,” Clara says, pressing a fond kiss to the Doctor’s temple. “Daft Time Lady. I’ll come and supervise.”

* * *

Watching the Doctor work is a lesson in juxtaposition.

When the Doctor is anywhere else, doing anything else, she is a hurricane. Accompanying the Time Lady, there is a steady, incessant flow of words and laughter and questions and answers to questions you haven’t asked yet; a constant, ceaseless stream of consciousness that the Doctor hardly seems to feel the need to punctuate with pauses for breath; and accompanying that is the relentless movement. There are weeping gestures that knock over vital components or valuable artefacts; enthusiastic, loping runs; fingers swiped through the air to take the measure of a place. Living with and loving the Doctor is conducted, through necessity, at a thousand miles an hour; it’s a funfair ride you can’t get off; a never-ending frenetic race across the universe.

Except for now. As she works, the Doctor lapses into careful, considered silence, her attention entirely captured by this or that problem as she concentrates on the ship. She bites down on her lip, turning a spanner or a screwdriver or a wrench in the tiniest of motions, a degree or two at a time; she ignites blowtorches and moves them with slow, deliberate motions over ruptured and damaged surfaces. She holds components delicately between her fingertips, making the smallest of adjustments as she does so, and then she replaces them with the care one usually reserves for newborns or fragile porcelain; a gentleness uncharacteristic to her usual frantic whirlwind of movement and sound.

Clara rests her book against her chest and looks over at the Doctor with fascination. The Time Lady’s coat is off, and no matter how many times Clara sees her without it, there’s still an odd sense of nakedness to seeing the Doctor in just her shirtsleeves. It seems more naked to Clara than average nudity; more exposed, more vulnerable, and she watches as the Doctor pushes up the sleeves of her undershirt to expose her forearms, the tendons in her wrists picked out in exquisite detail as her fingertips skim over them, leaving trails of oil and grime in their wake and creating a constellation of whorled fingerprints on the white fabric.

The Doctor lifts one end of the fluid link into her left hand and examines it with an eyeglass that’s clipped to the top of her head with a series of dark-hued straps and fastenings that cut across the brightness of her hair in harsh lines. There’s something reassuring in the patient, composed manner in which she turns the piece this way and that, assessing the surface, and then she reaches for a rasp and begins to move it slowly, hypnotically, over where the coupling has cracked.

It’s the same careful, measured consideration that the Doctor had shown on their first night spent together. Clara hadn’t known what to expect; had half-anticipated that the Doctor would be the same in bed as she was outside of their room; unstoppable, impulsive; uncontrolled and frenetic. Instead, she had found the Time Lady to be infinitely patient and impossibly methodical, slowly learning and memorising what Clara enjoyed; trailing her fingertips over the expanses of Clara’s skin as she murmured quietly to her how beautiful she was. Nothing had been done for the sake of it; everything had been measured, thought out, and considered; everything was a science experiment in its own right, only one that was infinitely more complex than any other the Doctor had ever carried out.

Slow. Composed. Patient.

A side of the Time Lady that she only feels safe showing to Clara and to her ship; a side that Clara watches her embrace now as she sets the rasp aside and reaches for the sonic, adjusting the setting with her thumb as the fluid link in her other hand makes a soft fizzing sound.

“You’re staring at me,” the Doctor notes, her hair falling over the side of her face not pressed against the complex eyeglass contraption. She stops and pushes it back with the hand holding the sonic, looking up at Clara, who feels her face burn by way of response. It’s one thing to look; it’s quite another to be caught doing so.

“Supervising,” Clara mumbles, looking back down at her book in the hope that the Doctor will be discouraged from pressing her further on the matter.

“No, it’s not that. It’s…”

“Supervising,” Clara repeats, her cheeks flushing maroon at having been caught out.

“Tell me,” the Doctor asks, her tone gentle. “Go on, is there something on my face?”

“No.”

“Have my trousers ripped without me noticing?”

“No.”

“Are you thinking I look like a hopeless mess?”

“No!”

“So, what you staring at me like that for?” the Doctor wrinkles her nose, the component held in her hands almost entirely forgotten. “I don’t mind. I can just feel you doing it. It tickles.”

“Just thinking.”

“About?”

“Stuff.”

“You know,” the Doctor affixes her with a bemused look, then looks down at the broken part of the ship. “I could have a better discussion with this fluid link than I could with you.”

“Just…” Clara hesitates for a moment, wondering how best to phrase her observation without sounding daft. “You’re different when you’re working on the ship. That’s all. That’s what I was thinking.”

“Different how?”

“Slower. Calmer. You don’t just… I don’t know, you don’t just bounce around at a thousand miles a minute. You think and you appraise and you consider and you judge and it’s… different. You aren’t just racing around… you’re thinking things through, you’re taking your time. And then I was thinking about how you do the same when we… when it’s just… in bed.”

The Doctor’s cheeks turn a delicate shade of pink then, as they always do at any allusion to what they do in what approximates to night on the TARDIS.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes,” Clara reasons, her mouth twisting into a shy little smile. “It makes me feel special. It makes me feel important. I can put the brakes on the million-mile-an-hour Time Lord. It’s… kind of intoxicating, knowing that.”

The Doctor mirrors Clara’s expression, her mouth quirking upwards irresistibly. “Feel safe with you.”

“I know.”

“Love you.”

“I know.”

“Could murder a cup of tea.”

“I… hey!” Clara rolls her eyes theatrically at the sudden shift in topic, but she doesn’t mind; she knows the Doctor is still uncertain and uncomfortable with such displays of affection, and this change of mood is her attempt to regain her grasp of familiar ground. “I see. This is why you wanted me here... to fetch you cups of tea and custard creams.”

“No!” the Doctor protests, looking wounded. “No, I just… yeah, alright, maybe. That and you do brighten the corridor up a great deal. And I could murder a custard cream… or two… or three.”

“Idiot,” Clara gets to her feet and crosses to where the Doctor is half-in and half-out of a wall panel, her leg tangled up in the other end of the fluid link. “Absolute idiot.”

“Always,” the Doctor concurs, kissing her quickly and then tipping her a wink. “Milk, seven sugars. And maybe bring the whole packet of biccies, yeah?”

Clara grins and turns away, heading back down the corridor and towards the junction that will lead her towards the kitchen. She hasn’t gone more than a few metres when there’s an unholy screech, and Clara freezes, her skin erupting into goosebumps at the high-pitched noise and what it might portend. It takes her less than a second to realise it’s the sound of rending metal, and she turns just as the ceiling panel above where the Doctor is working comes loose and falls down, down, down and towards the Time Lady’s face as though in slow motion.

“No-”

Clara’s warning comes too late, and she watches as the panel finishes its downward trajectory and smashes into the Doctor’s face with a sickening _thud_ , and the Time Lady falls back against the wall panel, crumpling down it and coming to rest on the floor in an awkward, splayed position, limbs akimbo and blood trickling down her face.

“Doctor?!”

Clara wants to run, but her legs feel as though they’re made of lead. She stares in horror at the prone figure of the Time Lady for what feels like hours, the ceiling panel still swinging above her head and the screech still audible, but at a fainter volume. It’s this that spurs Clara into motion as understanding dawns on her, and she darts down the corridor, racing towards the Doctor and dragging her carefully into the centre of the corridor as the panel finally comes completely loose and crashes to the floor where the Time Lady’s head had been seconds before, the sound of metal ringing against metal echoing along the corridor.

“Doctor?” Clara says again, panic clawing its way up her throat as she stares at the long, jagged gash across her partner’s forehead, blood oozing stickily over the eyeglass mechanism and into the Doctor’s hair. Clara undoes the straps with shaking fingers, casting the device aside, and discovers another cut over the Time Lady’s brow bone where the eyepiece has bitten into the skin; a semi-circular mark that looks artificially neat in contrast to the more severe injury higher up or the bruising already blossoming over her skin in shades of plum and puce.

“Doctor?” Clara asks again, as though repeating her name will help, and she puts her hands on the Doctor’s upper arms and shakes her gently, her fingers gripping the Time Lady hard. “Doctor… you’ve… you’ve had an accident; can you hear me? You’ve hit your head. Please. Can you hear me? Open your eyes.”

There’s no response, and a thought occurs to Clara; a terrible, ominous thought that terrifies her beyond all possible reason.

“Oh, god,” she begins to cry, shaking the Doctor again, more desperately this time, as though doing so might prevent the inevitable. “Wake up. Please wake up. Please don’t regenerate… come on, please… please don’t… you can’t…”

The Doctor’s eyes crack open a few millimetres, and Clara’s heart soars. It takes a moment for her to realise this might be the calm before the storm, but then the Doctor speaks.

“It’s…” the Doctor closes her eyes and takes a shuddering breath. “Ow. No chance. Too much… ow. Too much effort.”

Clara’s sobs redouble as she clings to the Doctor and weeps, relief coursing through her. “Don’t scare me like that,” she mumbles. “Alright? Don’t… don’t ever scare me like that again.”

“Ow. I won’t,” the Doctor raises her hand to her forehead, probing experimentally at the cut with a wince but then looking startled to discover that her fingertips come away wet with blood. “Urm. Just a thought, but should we see to this? Maybe? And then… I was promised custard creams.”


End file.
